4 hours to beat the game, and none of it is enjoyable. Awful story as well. Technical-overkill basically ruins the game.
Star Wars: The Force Unleashed 2 seems to be a response by the developers to criticism leveled at the original Force Unleashed. When the first Force Unleashed came out, everyone thought it was too short. Now the makers of the game are here to tell us "oh, F* us? Well FU 2!" And that's Force Unleashed 2. A 3-4 hour game max with a shallow story, shallow combat system, and absolutely no improvements from the original.
The story in the Force Unleashed 2 is a departure from the amazing, epic tale in the original. What you get in Force Unleashed 2 is Star Killer on a single-motivated quest to save his girlfriend, and nothing else. There is no further character development, like the evolving relationship between Star Killer and his partner, or the twist between friend in foe that made the original entry's tale memorable. The game also has 2 possible endings. You are given the illusion of choice at the end, however, one choice will lead to a shallow, lame, and unsatisfying ending, while the other is a more conclusive cinematic that actually makes sense. On my first play-through, I got the lesser, horrible ending and had to play the last level again to get at least some satisfaction out of the story. To make things worse, the cameo's made by famous Star Wars characters we've all come to know and love are terribly brief and unsatisfying. It's horribly obvious that these cameos are for the sake of the cameo alone, and not to move along or create a meaningful narrative. The worst part about the story is that the voice acting is still as terrific as it was; resulting in further disappointment that so much talent went to waste, and so quickly.
The gameplay in The Force Unleashed 2 has degraded into nigh-pure hack and slash as simple as Gauntlet Legends for the N64. I actually like it when action games don't hoard too many upgrades that take so long to unlock that the game isn't enjoyable until the last levels when you are fully powered up. However, it is obvious the amount of upgrades is specifically built within the incredibly small timeframe of the game's length. If Star Killer kept all the unlockable progression in the original game, you'd have to play through the game 4 times to get enough experience for everything. It sounds like an over-exaggeration, given that it is only half as short as the original, not a 1/4th the length, but long stretches, and even a complete level are devoid of any meaningful combat in the game. That's right, there is an entire "level" in an action game that has no combat. You walk through a swamp, collect some shiny upgrade orbs, and then watch a cut-scene. It was awful, and disappointing given the potential for the setting.
Yet, there is enough fun in being an immensely powerful jedi named Star KILLER to make combat enjoyable when in the heat of some epic battles. There just isn't enough room in a game that can be completed in a single sitting. There is even a half-backed challenge mode to add insult to the injury, of being deprived of enjoying what little there is to enjoy at all. The challenge mode does not give players survival mode against wave of enemies, or "Arkham Asylum" like challenges where we can just jump into large battles and slash thing up with a light saber. The challenge mode tests specific parts of the gameplay, rather than tie everything together. There is a challenge where you do nothing but try to prevent storm troopers from running away (they make no attempt to attack you), there is a jumping and platforming challenge, a blocking challenge, a dodging challenge, and only one semi-fun challenge where you fight several groups of enemies as fast as you can to get to the end. Rather than give players the ability to experience the best parts of the game in a controlled mode that can exemplify the best aspects of The Force Unleashed, players get a gimmicky set of watered-down challenges.
Oh, and The Force Unleashed 2 has good graphics. In fact, they are probably the best graphics I've seen on my Xbox 360 apart from Crysis 2. At this point, after describing everything wrong with this short, no more than 4-hours-long game, it's hard to see how the developers thought graphics can rescue it. Graphics probably took up the majority of the budget, and the rest of the game suffered from it. The developers don't seem to understand that graphics are simply the icing on the cake, and in this case, there is no case to put icing on. It is just a giant turd, with good-graphics icing. I'm still not eating a turd, even if it has icing on it. I bought this game on sale from a store selling it for only 15 dollars, and I still feel like I wasted money.
I wouldn't recommend this game at all. It does to Star Wars games what Team Ninja did to Metroid. Or, more appropriately, it does to Star Wars games what George Lucas did to Star Wars films with The Phantom Menace. Yeah, it is that bad.